The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

A man leaning on the fender of the truck ahead of us lifted his hand to Torin. The trucker, standing by his door with his toothpick, gave one slow nod. Somebody in the line tapped his horn twice, not loud. Just twice.

And behind us, I heard a truck door open and shut.

I turned around. Wendell was walking up the line toward the scale house.

He was a big man, Wendell, built like all the Lindgren men, wide in the shoulders, and he walked like his boots were heavy. His face was gray. He did not look at me. He walked right past my car and right past the log truck and stopped about six feet from my son.

Every driver in that yard was watching. I could feel it, the way you can feel weather coming.

Torin turned and looked at him. He did not step back. He did not step forward either.

For a long moment nobody said anything. The engines idled. A gust of wind came across the yard and blew yellow leaves off the top of the log pile and across the gravel between them.

Then Wendell said, loud enough that the scale man heard it, and the trucker heard it, and I heard it from twenty feet away:

“There never was a chain.”

Torin did not move.

“I hung those chains on the nail in March and they never came off,” Wendell said. His voice was rough, like it had not been used. “I was behind on the machine. Three payments behind. They were going to take it. And I told myself you were a kid and you wouldn’t fight it. That’s the truth of it.”

He stopped. He swallowed.

“I owe you twenty-three hundred dollars,” he said. “And I owe your mother an apology for standing in her yard and lying to her face.”

He looked at me then, finally. I nodded once. I could not have said a word if you had paid me.

“I can’t pay it all today,” Wendell said to Torin. “I’ll pay it by Christmas. You have my word, for whatever you think it’s worth now.”

My son looked at him for a long time. I have thought about that look a hundred times since. There was no gloating in it. There was not even anger. It was the look of somebody who has already moved past a thing and is a little sorry for the man who has not.

“By Christmas is fine,” Torin said.

Then he did a thing I will never forget. He held out his hand.

Wendell looked at it. And then he took it, and the two of them shook hands in front of the scale house with the whole line watching, and nobody said anything at all.

The scale man keyed his microphone.

“Next,” he said.

By Christmas

Wendell paid it. Three envelopes, one in November and two in December, the last one left in our mailbox the Saturday before Christmas with a card inside. The card had a picture of a deer in the snow on the front and inside it just said, in Wendell’s square handwriting, Torin. Paid in full. I’m sorry. W.

He did not lose his skidder. I heard at the co-op that he caught up on the payments in January. I was glad. I mean that. I did not want the man ruined. I only wanted my son paid.

But things were not the same for him in the county after that, and I do not think they will be. The story got told, and it kept getting told, in the church basement and at the feed mill and in the bar. Two landowners who had been talking to Wendell about cutting next year called Torin instead. People are polite to Wendell. They are just not as warm.

That is the consequence, and I believe it was the right size. He has to live inside it, and he does, and he came to our Christmas Eve service anyway and sat three rows behind us, and when it was over he shook Nils’s hand in the aisle. Nils held on a little longer than he needed to.

They have not hunted together since. Maybe they will next November. Nils says he would like that. I think he would.